This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Oct. 23, 2025.
The Vermont Public Utility Commission officially opened an investigation into Hyde Park Electric on Monday after the village utility admitted to the state last month that it was experiencing “significant financial distress.”
Hyde Park Electric, which serves 1,400 ratepayers, has failed to cover expenses as it struggles under the weight of its $1.5 million debt, and is “essentially not solvent,” according to correspondence between the state and the utility.
The Department of Public Service, which advocates on behalf of Vermont ratepayers, learned about the severity of the village utility’s situation only after another state program informed commissioner Kerrick Johnson that Hyde Park Electric had not been paying its bills.
After a meeting in Montpelier held Sept. 9, Johnson laid out his directives for addressing the situation in a letter to Hyde Park village manager Brian Evans-Mongeon on how to proceed in addressing a catastrophic situation that was “entirely of its own making.” Kerrick admonished the utility for failing to inform the state of its dire situation “months if not years ago.”
Johnson outlined concerns including the utility’s use of loans taken out by the village to cover losses incurred by the electric department; various loans that the utility had fallen behind on; and the handling of energy efficiency charge collections, which the utility had been using to cover other costs, rather than sending them on to the state as required.
“The Department continues to weigh all options relative to our view on whether Hyde Park Electric’s continued operation is the most efficient means of ensuring reliable, affordable and sustainable electric service to its ratepayers,” Johnson wrote. He later clarified that it is still his department’s position that the existence of a solvent village utility would be the best outcome for ratepayers.
In a subsequent letter to the Public Utility Commission filed on Sept. 29 at the behest of the Department of Public Service, Evans-Mongeon and village trustees chair Fredericka French told regulators that the department had unpaid transmission bills outstanding, along with other suspect financially unsound transactions that had resulted in a “negative retained earnings and a negative net income position.”
They promised that the utility, after contracting with the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority, would be cooperating fully with the state to right the ship.
“(Hyde Park Electric) understands the gravity of this situation and is endeavoring to restore (the utility’s) financial footing and assuring that its public service obligations are fully met,” the letter from the Hyde Park officials said.
In a follow-up interview, French pledged that there would be no interruption to electricity access in Hyde Park village, an assertion that Johnson corroborated.
Johnson said his department’s first priority was to work with Hyde Park Electric to propose a new rate increase that would allow the utility to stabilize itself financially while his department maintains strict financial surveillance going forward. But how, exactly, the Hyde Park board of trustees got itself into this mess remains a mystery.
French said that this was purely a matter of financial mismanagement, not fraud, while Johnson awaits the result of a VPPSA audit to adequately apportion blame, to “untangle in terms of responsibility and how and when we got here.”
Johnson said he had seen other municipal utilities face financial struggles, but Hyde Park’s insolvency is extraordinary.
“There’s been nothing like this where there’s been a series of utility management decisions over a period of time, especially the legally questionable, regulatory questionable, practices and measures and strategies undertaken,” he said. “This is not just doubling down; this is quadrupling down of debt and mismanagement that have brought the utility to its current position.”
Crisis unveiled
Shortly after Johnson was appointed to the Department of Public Service, he attended a regular February meeting of the Hyde Park village board of trustees with an offer of collaboration with the utility, with which he had concerns, but received no interest from the village.
As laid out in the public utility commission’s filing on Monday, Hyde Park Electric had been requesting rate increases that the commission believed “were insufficient to meet its operating needs.” The utility last filed for a rate increase of 2% in October 2023 and promised to return with another increase request the following spring, but didn’t.
In September, representatives from Efficiency Vermont reached out to Johnson for guidance when Hyde Park Electric, in what they say was an unprecedented situation, had not paid the remittance the utilities regularly pay the program.
Evans-Mongeon and the trustees met with Johnson in Montpelier in a “tense” meeting during which the utility ultimately admitted to being insolvent. According to Johnson, it took some discussion to get to that point.
“There was evasiveness, evasiveness and finger-pointing to anyone but themselves at first, and that was dismissed summarily, and (we) started to get, at last, an acknowledgement of the depth of the problem,” he said.
According to Johnson, along with being behind on various payments and in serious debt, the village had been covering the debt with loans it had taken out and had been commingling electric utility funds with its water and sewer utility.
In 2022, Lamoille County sued Hyde Park village for changing its water and sewer rate structure to protect residential customers while increasing the rate for state and county-owned buildings like the courthouse and elementary school from a $15 flat fee to $1,418 base charge. The county and village eventually settled on a slightly lesser fee.
This water and sewer rate adjustment was presided over by former Hyde Park village manager Carol Robertson. Robertson suddenly left her position in the spring of 2023 after developing serious medical issues and died that April, according to an announcement made by French. Evans-Mongeon took the job that same year.
Johnson said it’s unclear at this time how far back the mismanagement of Hyde Park Electric’s resources goes. French said past and current management practices would be scrutinized in the ongoing VPPSA audit.
A separate independent audit conducted by a St. Albans-based accounting firm Kittell Branagan & Sargent submitted to the village on Oct. 10 included comments complaining of significant delays in the auditing process due to a lack of documentation and accused management of not possessing “the expertise in financial accounting and reporting in order to prepare financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.”
State takes charge
Hyde Park Electric was already being investigated by the Public Utility Commission after implementing a new rate tariff for infrastructure upgrade costs that the commission felt it needed to better explain. The Department of Public Service pushed Hyde Park to abandon this request, filing a scathing motion to dismiss, instead of waiting for the trustees to make a decision.
It was a move that one of Hyde Park’s lawyers with Stackpole & French said, in an email to department lawyers, felt like the department was “just trying to kick HPE while they are down and took an opportunity to take another shot at them.” Ed French, senior partner at the law firm, is Fredericka French’s husband.
Johnson said the tenor of that initial meeting and Hyde Park Electric’s record of resisting cooperation with the state caused him to grow impatient.
“There’s fundamental cracks in the foundation of your house, and you’re doing new window treatments,” Johnson said of the rate tariff. “Stop it. Concentrate on the financial fundamentals. That’s where you should be concentrating on re-earning trust for your management team with the Department of Public Service.”
On Oct. 16, the Department of Public Service sent a proposed two-phase rate case process to Hyde Park, a plan that, as enacted, will stabilize the utility in the short-term.
The next part of the process will require the utility, under surveillance by the department and with the support of VPPSA, to submit a rate increase proposal that will allow it to achieve some form of long-term financial stability. Johnson said the rate increase will be substantial, but not “the most expensive rates in the state.”
A solvent Hyde Park Electric is still what Johnson believes will ultimately be best for its ratepayers, but dissolution is still on the table.
“It shouldn’t have taken a third party knocking on the department door that tipped us off to exactly the depth of the financial challenges that (they) are facing,” he said, “but the village and the leadership there have a responsibility towards its own rate payers as well as to the rest of the state’s rate-payers, to look for assistance when they need it.”
